But there’s something different about the present — something more sinister. The image above is, increasingly, how young people view the future, even as their elders seem oblivious to the triple threat of climate change, resource scarcity, and growing inequality.

There’s plenty to celebrate about a future that could be significantly more livable than the present, and we try to talk about those solutions here on Grist. Sometimes they’re even easy. And yet this view of the future persists. Why is that?